The Daily Grind - Chapter 268 (Patreon)

“The future is bulletproof!  The aftermath is secondary!” -My Chemical Romance, Look Alive Sunshine, Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys-

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James jerked back as the form of one of the quilldogs slammed into him.  It was a glancing hit, it wasn’t actually trying to kill him, he was just between it and where it was running, and the armor made it easy to take.  Not that the armor negated the force, but more that it spread it out, kept any of the sharpened pencils in its coat from catching in his flesh, and turned what could have been a serious injury from the thin creature into just a stagger.

He recovered with a wheeze of air as the quilldog bounced off him and kept running through the carpet that grew like a field of grey wheat around them.  James dropped his arm, carrying on the motion the dungeon life had started, and let go of the sledgehammer he was carrying.  Zhu’s taloned grip grabbed the tool out of the air a split second later; the navigator had basically no muscle, less force behind his projection than a physical human, but the hammer didn’t care.  It didn’t weigh anything.

They were still out of position.  The sudden eruption of motion from the quilldogs that had been lapping at a free standing water cooler out on the carpet plains had caught their scouting group off guard.  The ominous whirring hum of the chrome beetle that bore a striking resemblance to a Roomba bearing down on them had added to the feeling.  And now, the stupid dog hadn’t had the good sense to go around them, and James was left standing in front of the thing and still unbalanced.

Anesh and JP pulled the triggers on the net launchers that the expedition had brought in as part of a test run for new standard gear for Officium Mundi runs.  They were arrayed like a vanguard behind James, and while one of the nets just missed entirely, the vacuum beetle bearing down James ignored the other one in a much more horrifying way.  As the net threatened to tangle itself in the creature’s… legs?  Wheels?  James couldn’t tell.  Whatever it needed to move, it didn’t matter, because the beetled peeled back a flap on the front of its domed body to reveal an inner mouth that would make an OSHA inspector apoplectic.

The material for the netting was made of dense paracord.  This wasn’t something the Order had cobbled together like their magnetism grenades or the unhealthy amount of thermite they carried around.  These were professional, manufactured tools.  And the vacuum beetle just shredded it, bit by bit.  Flashing blades slicing back and forth while turning gears and gripping claws pulled more of it into its mouth.  The number of tools and the size of the inner space clearly out of line with what should be able to fit, not that the theoretical lack of room stopped it from having ten different length blades sweeping back and forth like the scanner on the car from Knight Rider but made of knives and not red lights.

The net did not slow it down, was the point.

From James’ left, he heard Arrush make a terrified panicked sound that he’d never actually heard from the ratroach before.  A flicker of ethereal blue unlight signaled the use of an absorbed blue, and something must have changed, but James didn’t see a direct effect or know what had happened, so he just tried to regain his footing and brace to throw himself over the thing and out of the way of its industrial grinder of a mouth.

Another quilldog came tearing out of the carpet grass at an angle between James and the beetle, and the massive chrome beast started to divert to the closer prey before the lamp-headed canine dove back out of sight.  But it bought him the second he needed, and James leapt, feeling his enhanced cognition make the timing smooth as his left shoulder landed high on the beetle’s back and he started to roll across it.  Zhu kept a grip on the sledgehammer as the weapon locked into place on the lip of the grinding maw, and his manifestation pulled on James like an extension of his own body to help the two of them roll to James’ knees on top of the rushing monster.

His mind shoved a command at the glove on his left hand, an almost never-used power from the Status Quo tool coming to life as James let Zhu brace them and pulled back his elbow for a downward strike.  His first punch hit the front right segment of the beetle’s back, and he had to yank his hand back as a flare of heat emanated from the spot he’d slammed down on.  Melt Iron wasn’t something they used often, but right now, it was certainly getting the roomba’s attention.

James hit it again, and a third time, burning through half the available charges in a few seconds before the beetle came to an abrupt stop and nearly threw him off.  When it flared its wings, interlocking chrome plates fanning out to create a dazzling display of gleaming metal with one small circular patch glowing orange, it did throw James off.

He slammed into the thick tall carpet, got tangled in it instantly instead of rolling, and was only barely yanked out of it by his arm by Bea as the roomba charged forward into the patch he’d been in, raising itself up to try to slam its whole body down since just darting forward hadn’t worked the first time.

”Oh good it does have legs!”  James heard himself saying as Zhu pressed the sledgehammer back into his hand and wrapped his talons around James’ fingers.

”Shoot it!”  JP’s voice, muffled by a waist high patch of carpet, gave a firm command.

The gunshots were sharp cracks despite the silencers, and the ones that hit made metallic ringing pings as they deflected off the beetle’s hull.  “Stop shooting it!”  Anesh yelled from the other side.

James wished he’d saved some of his [Separate Alloy] blue charges.  He missed the days of being able to just sublimate tumblefeeds in one hit KOs

Speaking of blue orb powers, he employed a use of [Move Person] to rapidly flicker out of the way of another charge.  The vacuum beetle seemed to have a hard time turning, but when it moved, it moved, darting forward like someone slammed on the gas pedal of a sports car.

He had a brief moment to look around.  His teammates were spread around the beetle in a rough semicircle, with Ganesh overhead looking for an opening and smart enough to not try lasering the reflective hide of the big round beast.  One slip up would mean a serious injury or even death, but there was no way they could run from it now.  The closest terrain was some desks coming out of the floor thirty feet away through waish high carpet, so running was out.  But at the same time, it had slow reflexes no matter how fast it was.  And they could just keep hitting it with different things until it gave up.

James realized suddenly he’d never had a battle of attrition in a dungeon before.  It was always tiny moments of sudden violence and struggle.  The closest to something like this was fighting multiple enemies at once.  But this was different, somehow.  As he made some quick signals over their skulljack link to reposition, and moved to force the creature to pivot so Anesh could get in a good hit with the dungeontech notepad that converted things it was pressed against into drawings, he felt weird.

Another charge, another attempt to grab one of them and rip them apart, but this time the dodge came easier as the group fell into a rhythm and Ganesh gave them a live feed from overhead that let them almost perfectly predict what was going to happen next.

”Here.”  Zhu’s feathers sunk back as an orange lance of light popped up in James vision, complete with the spot at which he needed to start swinging.  And when they spoiled the next charge, the roomba now having trampled and sliced away a wide circle of the tall carpet to form almost an arena to fight in, James was already there to hit it with enough force to snap one of its hidden little legs off.

Bit by bit, they wore it down.  Dismantling their foe with calculated violence, until eventually it just died without any drama or particular finishing blow.  At no point did the roomba try to communicate, or do anything except rend them limb from limb, and at no point did it succeed at that.

It felt weird.

”This also feels weird.”  Anesh told them as JP and Bea heaved the corpse upward so that Anesh could crawl under it and collect the orb.  James had been trying to explain how it felt a little cruel to fight like this, and JP had been reminding him of the rending thing, when Anesh interrupted by shimmying back out from under the mass of metal and burst spatial warp with an armful of orbs.  “It’s like a bloody loot pinata.”

James blinked.  “Man, I love you a ridiculous amount, but you cannot say it that way.”

”Pinata?”

”Piñata.”  Arrush supplied, his warped mouth chewing on the pronunciation even as he did a better job than Anesh did.  “Pin yahhht ah.”  He paused and looked around.  “Is… is this place a piñata? It gives us candy when we hit things.”

James smiled at the big guy as was reminded that Arrush probably spoke better Spanish than he did with his singular skill rank.  “That is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.”  He nodded in agreement.  “But let’s put that on hold.  Where’d all the orbs come from?”

Indeed, Anesh had come out from under the beetle with not just the hefty green and supplemental orange that James had expected, but also two small purples, a red, and about ten yellow orbs too.  He just gave a defeated shrug at the question.  There was no real way to know why the dungeon did things the way it did sometimes.  All they could do was measure what was going on, and test to see if they could narrow down the conditions and reasons.

They packed up the orbs, and then continued aiming themselves across the wide open expanse of carpet.  Heading for a rendezvous with their secondary expedition, and mapping out a much faster way through the Office than they’d previously known.  Though to be fair, they’d really only found the route for a one time use when they were running for their lives.  So pretty much any route would be faster.

This route just happened to have giant beetles.

At least the jumbled desks that were half submerged in the floor had a surprising amount of cash in them.

_____

”So, I got a skill rank.”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight told James casually as he used a pair of tinted binoculars to try to spot movement in the ceiling above them.  The camraconda was hanging out with James since half her team was taking it easy for the next day or two; already stacking up small cuts or bruises from constant action, and the rest of her team was Harvey who was actually too hurt to keep going.

Not that James felt much better.  It turned out that, between throwing himself around the floating islands of the bathroom, getting in a fight with a giant misshapen humanoid figure at the top of the lighthouse, and then throwing himself against the metal hide of a roomba that would be a threat to most Earth megafauna, he was a little sore.  Slightly tense.  Mildly bruised.

Sunny was also hanging out with him because Anesh, JP, and Arrush had taken the same option as her own team, and hung back to try to rest and recover.  And James was once again reminded that he was actually a lot harder to stop than most people.  Especially Arrush; he really needed to keep in mind that his friend, even in a form upgraded over most baseline ratroaches, was actually pretty fragile.  He could be vicious, but he wasn’t invincible.

“What skill?”  James asked offhandedly as he thought he saw one of the massive platforms that pretended to be normal ceiling tiles sway slightly.  Was that them?  Kirk and his group would have had almost six hours by now, given how the timing on the two different dungeon entrances worked.

The whole area they were in was unfamiliar to James, but he attributed that to bad memory.  How, exactly would he be able to spot the exact place he dropped out of the sky and saved Theo and Daniel from a tumblefeed?  The entire problem with mapping the Office was that everything actually was just repeating cubicles forever.  The points of interest were cool because anything stood out against an endless sea of beige and grey.

“History of municipal garbage collection.”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight looked behind them, feeling silly as she said the words.  If she was more integrated with the mechanical arms she was wearing, she would have twiddled her thumbs.  “Which is stupid.”

”Don’t you have a Sewer lesson for history?”  James asked.  “Also which part is stupid?”  He sighed as he let the binoculars drop on the strap that held them bound to his armor, and settled his back against the sturdy support pillar that made up the corner of the intersection they were stopped at.  A cubicle wall and a water cooler ahead of them, dirt from the smashed potted plant spread across the left side path, it all looked like every other row of cubicles in here.  A little bit twisted, and certainly too large, but still just a slightly weird office environment.  Repeated for the five thousandth time.

The camraconda girl swung her body back around to peek around the corner as she spoke in her low digital voice, the motion not changing that her words came from the same spot with the speakers centered on her body harness.  “It’s my first skill.”  She said, putting a glum note into her artificial words.  “It’s supposed to be… special, isn’t it?”

”Sunny, my first skill was for arranging phone books.  No one gets a first skill they can use.”

”Alanna got one for snowboarding!”

”And?”  James snorted.  “Last week, we were on the Climb, a literally perfect place for it, and no snowboarding happened.  This is just how it goes, not every skill changes your life.”  He paused, then glanced at Frequency with a worried frown.  “That was your first skill?”  He asked.

She hissed in annoyance.  “I was trying to be symbolic with it!  I wanted to steal something from this stupid place!”  She

James could understand that.  “Okay, but still… I dunno, I feel like you guys are part of the Order, you know?  You deserve to share the magic we’re finding.”

”Oh!  Yeah, no, that’s cool.  I just ate all the orbs for a while.  Then I stockpiled them, for, you know… later?  After we learned that I could eat pizza and also security footage.”

”That’s still weird to me.”

”Whatever, you’ll get used to it.  In ‘a week’ probably.”

The overt sarcasm had James laughing before he realized why or what he was laughing at.  “Sorry, what?”

His camraconda escort focused on him, her camera eye twitching slightly.  “The big Climb delver, the one I didn’t get to go on?  The one two months ago?  It’s almost… uh… Juuuuune?” She broke off looking at him and whipped her head away.  “Month names are stupid.  It’s almost number six.”

”That’s June, you’re right.”  James wanted to pat her on the head but felt it might be weird.

She abandoned her position instantly.  “Month names are fine then.”

”Also I’ve been busy and tired, you can’t expect me to look at… uh… the calendar app that I have in my skulljack for exactly this reason.”  James utterly failed to defend himself.  “Anyway.  Did you get your lesson up?”

”Yup!  Took another point in solidity, since my memory is apparently the bestest and so I didn’t need any of that.  So I’m two and two with that and malleability.” She caught James opening his mouth and hissed at him in a shushing way.  “They don’t cancel out, they work together.  I’m all bendy when I need to be, but things that hit me too hard bounce off.  It’s really cool, and also I sorta feel different?  Like I can feel more through my outsides.”

James nodded.  “That is really cool.  You’re also gaining levels in that lesson so damn fast compared to me.  I’m a bit jealous.”

”Specialization is for insects, like that one guy said.”  She nodded, agreeing with something James wasn’t clear on.

“…That… what?  No, you’re not… Sunny do you think you’re a bug?”

”Aren’t snakes a kind of insect?”  She tilted her head in confusion.

”I legitimately can’t tell if you’re messing with me.“ James sighed as he raised his binoculars and kept scanning the ceiling.  He knew the other team was up there, they’d had a brief radio communication.  But there was at least one wi-figment around here, and it was active enough that talking that way just wasn’t safe.  “Oop, I think I see something.  Zhu, wake up.”  James said the words, even though it wasn’t actually speaking that prodded the navigator awake, but instead a state of mind he had to push himself into.

He lowered his eyes before dropping the optics.  Looking at the ceiling this deep into the dungeon was actually a risk; sometimes the lights were hypnotic.  The tint wasn’t just so he didn’t blind himself.

James and Frequency moved forward by a few hundred cubicles as Zhu started to manifest, only delayed slightly by a maul cart trying to run James over, and a pack of particularly angry but not especially cunning living staplers attempting to swarm James.  He’d been noticing a pattern around here.  The native life just didn’t attack Sunny unless she was actively working against them.  They collected the orbs, used a few of them, and kept moving.

[+1 Skill Rank : Music - Hip Hop - Japanese]

[+1 Skill Rank : Fabrication - Gears - Wooden - Manual Carving]

[+1 Skill Rank : Agriculture - Soybeans - Planting]

”I’m gonna retire from the Order and become something else.”  James declared.

”I’m gonna retire from the Order and be something even dumber.”  Sunny shot back.  “I got a point in beans.”

”Soybeans?”

”Yeah!  How’d you know?  Also what’s a soybean?”

James shook his head and wrote down a quick note on the overlap, forgoing his skulljack tools while there was a potential digital invader in the area. ”Weird coincidence, and I’ll tell you later.”

They kept going, passing cubicles that were definitely populated but by creatures that didn’t try to kill them as they moved through the corridor.  Heading toward where the ceiling was showing signs of motion, Zhu kept them moving in the right direction as he finally got his feathers out and shrugged off the lingering sleepiness of his nap, while the more physical duo kept an eye out for anything threatening.

And James, specifically, kept an eye out for the little moments of weirdness that reminded him that they were somewhere odd.

A vending machine advertising so/da, with a recycling bin next to it that had never had a single can thrown in its pristine plastic shell.  An office chair spinning under its own power in an empty cubicle.  One of those cubicles that James found mildly racist done up like a stereotype of a Japanese environment and with a few masks made of sticky notes hanging silently on the walls.  The distant sound of something chiming cheerfully, and the less distant smell of fresh coffee in a place with no one to brew it.

Everything looking perfectly mundane until they turned a corner and were met with a flowering desk phone.  Cheap black plastic and the curly stretchy cable that connected the handset to the base exploded across a cubicle wall.  Only it wasn’t destroyed, it was a living, growing, vibrant piece of life.  Sunken spots for handsets dug copper wire roots into the wall, while bursts of black curls bloomed in splotches.  Rubber and plastic and a few silicon components, occasionally ringing softly as the air conditioning rustled them ever so slightly.  The whole thing looking so peacefully weird that James wanted to reach out and pick up one of the receivers, until Sunny froze him in place and he realized what he was about to touch.

“Incoming.”  Zhu spoke suddenly, pointing upward with an arm that was more like a thin wing, getting incorporeal feathers in James’ face as he did.

Frequency-Of-Sunlight arched her body back, the cables that made up her form creaking slightly under her armor as she twisted to look upward.  “Ooh, don’t see that often!”  She commented at the ceiling tile that was tipping sideways dramatically enough that it was noticeable from forty feet below on the ground.

She was the local expert, so James deferred to her knowledge.  “Looks like we found ‘em then.  Oh, yup!”  Overhead, he watched as the tilted platform wobbled, the lights mounted in it not even flickering as they tilted back and forth.  Another tile suddenly moved with an impact from overhead, then another, revealing itself to be much closer to the floor than the ones above it.  The optical illusion of the ceiling broken as motion made it clear that it wasn’t at all one unbroken surface.  “Wait, Zhu, what did you mean by-“

”Incoming!”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight happily called as the angular form of a hang glider launched itself off the platform.  Then a second behind it, though pointed down at a slightly worrying angle.  Then the third one rolled off the edge, and she made an abrupt hissing screech that definitely got noticed by things living in the cubicles around them.  “James!  Incoming!”  Her artificial voice was a lot less happy this time around.

James had barely started to widen his eyes as he watched multiple shapes - people - tumble over the edge, one with a glider that was more of a problem than a solution, two others without anything to stop the fall.  He was already moving before he really processed his shock, Zhu working in his vision to calculate fall speed, time to impact, and angle of approach.

They were close to directly below the falling figures, but not exactly, and what looked like a small difference added up to James needing to clear a lot of space very quickly, which was hard when there was a double row of cubicles in the way.  Zhu gave him a vector and was trying to say something important, but James only heard his own heartbeat and the noise of cheap plywood creaking under him as his dash took him up onto a desk, and he vaulted over a cubicle wall to try to land feet first on the identical desk on the other side.  A flick of intent and [Move Person] grabbed Sunny to the hallway in front of him, letting the camraconda bypass the athletics as James slid to the floor and nearly tripped over the four different chairs inexplicably piled in this cubicle.

It took them maybe ten seconds, which was enough time that all three figures hit the ground.

The one in the hang glider who had managed to force it into place to start slowing their descent impacted a tall cubicle wall right in front of where James and Zhu were running to try to help somehow.  The mildly carpet covered material snapping and folding under the sudden impact and doing very little to soften it.  From the other side of this new hallway, there was a crunch as one of the other two falling figures went through an overhanging piece of cubicle ceiling and then smashed into what was probably the computer monitor inside the cubicle itself.  The third figure, a human man trailing an orange feathered aura, just slammed into the floor right next to Frequency, her reaction time not fast enough to stop him.

James froze, a gnawing dread in his gut as he tried to pick out who it was that had just carved a line through the wall in front of them.  There was blood on the wobbling edge of the cubicle, the powdery material that had been ripped in half having also gotten its revenge on the falling failed glider pilot.  Out in the hall, Kirk made a gasping wheeze that turned into a pitiful groan of pain, and the sound snapped James into action.  “Check him!”  He pointed at the downed man with a carpet of orange feathers laying limp under him, as he stepped up to his own victim and pulled a chunk of broken cubicle aside.

They’d fallen from the lowest ceiling tile.  That was still at least twenty feet up, probably closer to thirty.  James tried not to think about how fatal that was supposed to be as he and Zhu shoved debris aside to get at the fallen person.  The Order had a lot of ways to improve durability, but one too many broken bones and a snapped neck would still kill someone.  Internal bleeding would still kill someone.  So many things that falling from that high could do would kill someone.

The glider had one of its struts snapped and another bent in a position that was wrapping the cloth around a limb, so James rapidly drew Breath to push into the spell that would grow him a bonus limb out of ice.  Making that limb essentially a single joint with the sharpest edge he could, he promptly ruined that edge before dismissing the arm into broken fragments, cutting a line through the cloth and a twisted handle to free the person inside.

”Ow.”  Was what he was pretty sure Chevoy was trying to say.  Her face was a ruin of blood, mouth sagging open with her jaw in a position that was grotesquely broken, and James had to struggle not to wretch as he realized that she’d left a pair of her teeth in the side of the wall as she’d fallen into it.  But she breathing, and that meant they could fix the rest of it later.

”Don’t fucking move.”  He told her, Zhu’s taloned hand supporting the back of her head while James pulled her out of the glider’s harness and let her lay flat instead of held upward at an angle by the broken contraption.  James was going to start a medical check, but instead snapped his head up at Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s alarmed hiss.  Coming down the hallway to their left were a pair of inhuman figures; sharp professional dress and perfectly normal appearances tinted with the hint of the alien that made it very clear they were not people.  “You don’t fucking move either!”  James pointed threateningly at them.

Which didn’t work.  One of them let out a canine howl, dropping to all fours and bursting into a dash toward them, the other one frozen in place.  James didn’t have time to pivot fully to face it before it was on him, so he reflexively tried out the magic on his left hand’s glove that broke wood to see if it would work on something made of paper.

It didn’t, and his punch landed with force mostly from the paper pusher’s lunge.  But it did land, sending the thing slightly off course and crashing into James’ leg instead of bowling him over.  Instantly it started grabbing at him, hands twisting as it snarled and tried to gnaw through his armor.  It locked into place around him as Sunny swapped targets, the second one letting out its own howl and starting to run as she gave James a window to act.  He took it, pulling his foot up and stomping twice as hard as he could on the thing’s head.  It cracked open on the second impact, dust leaking from it like a wound, but that wasn’t enough to kill one of these things.

The second one reached him almost at the same time Sunny did, the camraconda slithering past him a lot faster than James thought of them as being able to move.  One of her mechanical limbs lashing forward with a blade gripped in it, a flare of copper light coming from one of the many earrings she was wearing as she put the perfect strike power to use.  She cut the second paper pusher’s arm off without looking at it, still staring at the one James was trying to kill even as she danced around him like he was a piece of terrain, dueling the faster second enemy with precise cuts.  Zhu’s arm raked talons across the one the camraconda was fighting, opening up more gashes leaking dust and confetti along with her own stabs.

On the fifth stomp, James ground his heel into the paper pusher’s neck and separated its head from its body, and that finally killed it, freeing up Sunny to freeze the second one and decapitate it too.

”Yellow or green?!”  James asked abruptly of the camraconda.  She hissed back at him in confusion.  “The orb, yellow or green?”

”This one’s green.”

”Shit.  Yellow here.  We should have saved more of the others.”  James grabbed the ball out of the corpse.  “We need to move, they absolutely made too much noise.  Get Kirk, give him yellows.”  Frequency nodded at him and slithered to comply, her hands slotting the knife back into its spot on her flank and trying to carefully pull yellow orbs out of the pouch she was wearing.  James took the bigger one and rushed back to Chevoy.  “Here.”  He pressed it into her hand.  “Absorb this.  You know how?”

She groaned but didn’t try to nod.  Instead working to focus on the process, her eyes slipping in and out of focus.  “Oh, that’s bad.”  Zhu whispered next to James’ ear.  “She’s dying.  Slowly, but…”

Chevoy heard him, and took it as a challenge, her vision sharpening as she pulled on the yellow orb in her hand and then sucked it into her body.  Instead of a skill rank, earning herself operational time.  And suddenly, her injuries weren’t killing her.

They weren’t getting better, but they weren’t killing her.

”Uuahghhha.”  She slurred out a non-word as she let James help her to her feet.  “Uh eh eider!”  The orb’s power did nothing for her broken jaw.  “Eider.  Uck.”  Chevoy looked around in a way that was absolutely not good for any broken bones she had under her armor.

”Spider?”  James asked.  “Vent spider?” Chevoy nodded, and James grimaced.  “Okay.  Zhu?”

”Got it.  It landed this way.  Also she means we need to help it.”  The navigator cut through a knot he saw in the tangled local paths.  It was exhausting, but everything was these days, and if they needed to help someone, time mattered.  “Over or around?”  He asked James.

James didn’t think about it very long.  ”Over.  Faster.”  He got a line of orange light that took him through a gap in the cubicle wall, the whole row of the structures a little bit out of alignment since two people crashed into them.  The path was more like through, but he and Zhu didn’t have the time to banter and focus as they found the cracked and leaking form of one of the spider creatures that lived up overhead laying on its side on the desk.  It had shattered the computer monitor on the way down, and had done enough incidental damage that there were three blue orbs and one red rolling off the edge of the desk.

The creature was a rectangular body, no attempt made to hide the inorganic nature of its edges.  A circular indentation on its side held a slowly turning intake fan, matching a few others on its back.  A neck of ventilation pipe poked out from the front about a foot before ending in a face that was made up of several loops of heavy cabling.  The three loops stretched out from a central point like flower petals, the empty space in the middle of each of them holding a hovering LED that was probably an eye of sorts.  It had eight legs that looked like hinged fan blades - heavy fan blades too - though they didn’t seem that sharp to James.

He’d never gotten a good look at these things when he’d been running from them a couple years back.  Up close and injured like this, it just… looked normal to him.  Maybe that was the result of too much dungeon delving.

James approached, reaching for more orbs in his pouch, and the vent spider struggled to get its legs up, sudden flailing causing it to screech in pain and further leak a cool blue blood onto the desk.  “We’re here to help!”  James stepped back, holding up his hands with Zhu’s extra arm fanned out from his own in the same position.  He palmed a yellow orb, pulling it up to his fingers and reaching out to the creature.  “Can you absorb this?  We can get you to someone who can save you, if you can make it.”

The spider looked at him with its two surviving eyes as one of them flickered and died.  The loops of cord pulled back against its head like it was wilting.  It slumped without a sound, and let its bladed legs drop to allow James to approach, which he did without hesitation, not even considering if it would try to hurt him.  It was broken, and he was armored, and besides, Chevoy had said it needed help.  So he pressed the yellow orb against it, and when the creature managed to absorb it, he added a few more of the smaller orbs to make sure it had enough time.

”Come on.”  James said, offering an arm under its body to help it off the desk.  “Let’s get back to the others.  We need to get you real help before those run out.”

The trip back was almost a worse battle of attrition than James had felt the beetle was.  The noise of the fall and the howling paper pushers seemed to have everything riled up, or wandering in from other places seeking prey.  He lost one of his hatchets to a shellaxy that almost bit his hand off, both his thermite weapons to a tumblefeed that rampaged in looking for a fight, the chest plate of his armor to a 2.0 that wanted to pursue a career as a sniper, and a small amount of his blood to a mixed group of smaller creatures that kept laying ambushes like they were an army and not wildlife.

But they did get back.  They even managed to rendezvous with the two who had actually gotten down safely, John and a woman James hadn’t met before both having a million apologies for their wounded teammates that got silenced before they attracted more trouble.

After stumbling back through the camp’s perimeter, their two medics had rushed to check over the damage to the humans, while Mars took a closer look at the more mechanical wounded.  Deb had rapidly reached the conclusion that the two needed to get the fuck out of the dungeon, immediently.  The Order had the tools to keep them alive, but they were all back at the Lair.  Medico authorities and shaper substance and extra copies of certain purple orbs.  Even that might not be enough; Kirk had some serious internal bleeding going on.  But Deb projected confidence, and if nothing else, they could feed the two an endless supply of yellow orbs to keep them alive.

The spider was harder.  Mars said he could probably repair the damage, but its insides were part organic, so he wasn’t sure if that was all that would matter.  But Kirk, still in intense pain from his injuries even if they weren’t stopping him, insisted that they do everything they could.  So Deb and Mars had taken the trio home, their teammates going along to help move them, the whole group taking the hit of powerful nausea and pain from teleporting out of Officium Mundi in exchange for getting them directly to the best medical care the Order could provide.

It would be days before the expedition would know if they’d survived, or what had happened in the ceiling.  And the event cast a grim mood over the rest of the day as they continued to travel deeper into the dungeon.

_____

“This is weird, right?”  Alex asked James and Zhu as she tossed a thick blanket over the softly buzzing electromagnet on the floor of the cave.  Well, the magnet, and also the several hundred flying thumbtacks and pins that would be happy to exsanguinate all of them if given the chance.  It might not even work on Zhu, but they’d still try.

Nearby, Arrush looked up from where he was crouched down with his angular insectile face pressed up against one of the crystal water jugs growing out of the floor.  The cave was full of the things, the ones overhead slowly dripping down to fill the ones below, odd angles not changing that the drops lined up perfectly.  Most of the time.  There was an oval pond in the middle of the cave, sunken down into the hard concrete floor.  It wasn’t clear if it was the crystal that was glowing, or the water, or a combination of the two, but the whole place was washed in light that sparkled on everything it touched, leaving even their black armor shells looking opalescent.

James didn’t look back at Alex as he moved around the external wall, tapping different spots and listening for a good metallic ringing as he played his light across the shadowy parts of the cave.  “Which part?”  He asked.  “The part where we’re doing what feels like ‘normal’ Office operations, the part where it feels like we should have planned for a month and not a week to actually get deeper into this place, or the part where… where people nearly died, and…”

He took a breath, trying to push back the wave of grim emotion.

”That part.”  Alex nodded.  “Shouldn’t we be doing something?”

”Got any healing spells?”  Zhu asked, jumping into the conversation.

Alex met his eye.  ”You know we don’t, man.”  She said with a hint of real anger.

James sighed and placed his free hand on Zhu’s arm.  “Yeah, Alex.  That’s… Zhu stop being an ass.  What he’s getting at is that we’re not doctors, or healers.  I’m barely a medic, you somehow ended up way better at that stuff than me.”

”I hang out with Deb a lot and all her doctory orbs have diminishing returns, so I ended up with them.”  Alex shrugged, downplaying the fact that she was qualified to work in any hospital in the world if she wanted and could fake the credentials.  “But.”  She squared up her shoulders and paused for ten seconds to calm down.  “I get it.  I get that we can’t help.  But we’re just… still going?  Doing normal resource extraction?  Like it’s all normal?”

James held out his hand and Zhu slipped the back off an adhesive sticker before handing it off so that James could slap it onto the wall.  They weren’t the ones handling the actual extraction, they were just here to make sure the cave was safe enough for the others to come in.  Some of the noncombatants from Research wanted to see the place, and James didn’t blame them.  It really was beautiful.

The whole place felt like a dragon’s hoard to him.  The crystal that gleamed with magic light, the way even the defenders were shiny points of glimmering metal, the perfect arrangement of it all.  Even the dull silver streaks of metal in the walls were actually silver, and not just steel rebar supports.  And many of them hid a deep treasure of this dungeon; microchips made of industrial emerald, that would happily grow a single program each.  The code would look like gibberish to even an expert programmer, but it would work.  If you let it grow long enough.

It just didn’t feel like somewhere that was left abandoned.  It felt purposeful, but not in the way the Office tended to make its little biomes.  But they never found any dragons living in the caves; so far the only one James had seen had nested in a server room instead.

He sighed as he marked another exposed silver circuit.  “I don’t know.”  James said stiffly, the words barely coming out.  “I don’t.  It’s… this doesn’t happen, you know?  People don’t get hurt in dungeons.  Not like this.  It’s Earth that’s dangerous.  This is supposed to be…”  He trailed off, staring at the wall illuminated by his flashlight and Zhu’s orange aura.

Silently, Arrush rose and padded over to James before tentatively reaching out one of his main arms.  Zhu’s eye locked onto the ratroach and the navigator gave a quick nod before adjusting where he was manifested, letting Arrush reach in to give James a light hug with his multitudinous limbs.  “It will be… okay.”  He said, trying not to drip corrosive drool on James’ head.

James leaned back into Arrush, taking a surprising amount of comfort in the hug even when they were both armored.  “I hope so.  I mean, we’ve got so many options.  Maybe they just dunk Kirk in a tub of blue orbs, right?”  James tried out a laugh.

“Hey, uh… not to interrupt you guys or anything.”  Alex said lightly as she circled around the other side of the cave tapping her boot on one of the water tanks that was oddly dark compared to the others.  “But can we get a reality check on James saying people don’t get hurt in dungeons?”

”Not hurt like that.”  James clarified.  “Not… not dead.  People don’t die in dungeons.  With several notable exceptions.”

Arrush placed a paw on the back of James’ head.  “That is… the dumbest thing you have said.”  He rasped out.  “So many people die in these places.  Please… please be more careful?”

”Yeah dude, like, are you forgetting the five or so people who bit it when you rescued my ass from this place?  Or how many kids the Sewer ate.  Or how many ratroaches the Sewer ate?!”  Alex was working up a good momentum.  “We don’t even know what the casualty rate for the Climb is, but it’s probably close to ‘yes’!  And the Attic…!”

James twisted around to face her over the softly glowing pond of water, a few stray drops falling between them as he wrapped an arm around Arrush’s offputtingly thin waist.  “No no, go on.  I wanna know about how lethal Clutter Ascent is.”

”…I didn’t plan this far ahead when I started yelling.”  Alex admitted.  “But come on.”

”No, yeah, you’re right.”  James admitted himself.  “The first time Anesh and I came in here, we nearly died repeatedly.  I broke his arm on delve number two.”  He shuddered, still remembering the first time he’d felt a bone snap under his attack, and also remembering how it was someone he loved in a stupid accident.  “I’m being an idiot.  But I thought we took so many precautions, and we’re still…”

”We’re still in a dungeon.”  Alex said.  “I think this place is less openly pissed off than everywhere else, but it’s still fine killing us.”  She shrugged.  “Like, I’m actually surprised that the stuff in the darker water tanks here isn’t some kind of living acid monster.”

”Oh, yeah, everyone thinks that.”  James laughed in a rush of catharsis.  “It’s actually just water.  We’ve tested a bunch of them.”  He untangled himself from Arrush as he stretched, trying to banish the lingering soreness in his body that was the result of accumulated damage and not something an exercise potion could fix.  “Did you check the other slope out of here?  We can finish up tagging the walls and then… I dunno, go explore more while the others take this place apart.”

”It comes out on a little ledge, yeah.”  Alex said, looking at where the floor shifted from concrete back to carpet on the far side of the cave.  “There was a big flat space, and a couple big printers or something wandering around, but they’re down a few feet and didn’t see me, so I think it’s fine.”  She looked at the blanket she’d tossed on the floor earlier. “What’re we doing about the pinpoints?”

”Oh, they’ll be fine.”  James said, gently stopping Arrush from nudging the heavy covering with a claw.  “We’ll let them go when we’re done.”

Alex shrugged.  “Sure.  I mean, I guess.  It’s weird that we let them live when they try to kill us a lot more than the staplers, right?  We don’t even know if they drop an orb.”

Arrush gave a wet chuckle.  “Do you want to break all of them?”  He asked with a lopsided grin.  Then he brightened up - somewhat literally as he opened his mouth - as he had an idea.  “I could melt them.  Might be faster?”

”Melt them how?”  Zhu asked with a confused rumble to his voice.

”Please don’t puke on the tiny wasp things that might not die from it.”  James rubbed a hand across his face.  “Best case scenario, we get a few orbs.  Worst case, the flying stabby things are now covered in acid.  And vomit.  And acid vomit.”

”…I have other fluids.”  Arrush sullenly offered.

”Wow does that not make it better.”  Alex patted him on the shoulder as she hopped over the pond and took a stack of the sticker flags from Zhu.  “I’m sorry I asked, let’s wrap this up.”

_____

[+4 Skill Ranks - Alpaca]

”You know, I’ve got this many skill ranks in artillery bombardment too, and that one’s never come up.  Anyone want to take bets whether I get my hands on a huacaya or a mortar first?”

No one took James up on his bet.

_____

Deeper in with every passing hour, the Order’s expedition slowly shed the feeling of anxiety about their wounded.  With no way to get news from outside, and an assumption that they had enough magical bullshit to keep anyone alive through something that wasn’t instant death, they pressed on and slowly the mood improved.

Officium Mundi only sometimes shifted its layout, which made maps of it stable.  But this far in, the only map was a half remembered escape from over a year ago.  They were past the first big wall, past where they knew all the tricks and traps, and into the places where Officium Mundi started getting strange.  Or at least, strange to them.  New and weird, novel and dangerous.

Progress slowed, as they took every turn in the endless halls and new open space carefully.  Scouting and watching, making sure nothing could catch the large group off guard.  Making sure no new serious injuries manifested.  But progress was still happening.

Sometimes the Office got one over on them.  Like when Vadik, not paying attention, got his leg snapped up in a cardboard box that had lunged at him and then folded together like a bear trap on the closest limb.  The spikes of it were sharper than cardboard should be allowed to be, but fortunately failed to penetrate his armor.  Once he was pried out of the trap, the box had almost instantly folded itself back into looking like a normal package sitting next to a desk.  At least, up until they’d dismantled it and a small red orb had dropped from the trap.

That was a relief, honestly.  James wasn’t sure how he’d be able to cope with worrying that cardboard boxes were alive.  If they were just complicated ‘traps’, that was a lot easier to work with.

Sometimes they almost incidentally countered whatever showed up to challenge them.  As when they stopped to investigate one of the bizarrely out of place windows that couldn’t possibly show the outside, and sometimes spat birds made of partly-molten glass at them.  That was when James got to learn that [Melt Glass] was a blue orb power that apparently a few people had picked up from a copy test that didn’t really enter standard use, and had just been kicking around for a while.  And also that the partly part of partly-molten was important to the birds not just falling apart.

The birds dropped the smallest green orbs James had ever seen, along with a few yellows each.  They still didn’t know what was going on with the dungeon doing this; they’d seen life drop multiple orbs before, but it seemed like the deeper in they went, the more common it was getting, even though that had never been the case before.

Sometimes they made friends.  Actually they made a lot of friends.  The animalistic shellaxies were increasingly aggressive as they moved inward, but that didn’t make them evil, and they responded well to treats even when they didn’t end up following the caravan.  Striders and tapirs though were capable of developing a sharper intellect, and while some of the smart ones did subscribe to the kill or be killed cutthroat philosophy of the dungeon, many still chose to take a chance riding along in the carts.  Especially after they saw others like them, Ganesh or Magneto or sometimes Frequency-Of-Sunlight when she didn’t scare them off just by being a camraconda.  They were even pretty sure that the expedition had a wi-figment following them without being openly hostile, which was amazing.

It suited James fine.  Orbs were great, but they were long past the point where they ever needed to kill a single Office life to get more magic.  He knew it wasn’t the only opinion, but he’d be fine getting by with blues and reds forever at this point, along with a growing pluralism to his world.

Sometimes they just had proper fights.  Where the dungeon threw something dangerous at them, with no remorse or expectation of anything but checking to see if it could kill them, and they had to fight.  And when the residents of the dungeon used their cunning for violence, it could be a potentially lethal threat.  That was what had happened when a paper pusher had shown up prepared for an ambush, leading with a purple orb infomorph curse that had Myles instantly dropping every weapon he had, and then following it up by brandishing a yellow legal pad and a glowing pen while ordering a collection of striders and some kind of keyboard-plated armadillo things to distract the rest of the team.

He hated to admit it, but James liked that, too.  Maybe Alanna was rubbing off on him, but he found the direct confrontation to be refreshingly direct.  And after they’d routed the enemy, leaving most of the smaller creatures alive once the paper pusher was down, they got to take the legal pad that stole plans, a pen that was basically a flaming sword by shorter, and also a dozen other items the paper pusher had collected.  James wasn’t sure if the watch it had on was magic, but he wanted to find out.

Sometimes they found bizarre geometry.  Like the long staircase that went both up and down a level, standing out in the middle of a hundred packed cubicles in an area with a low ceiling, and also the only time they’d ever seen stairs here.  Glass railings and speckled stone steps giving it a professional, clean look, as it threatened to open up even more territory to exploration.

The staircase led to itself.  Climbing it had a delver arrive up from the bottom level.  Descending had them come down from above.  It was disorienting and weird, and no one could find the orange orb powering it.  Zhu offered, but said it would probably be a “staircase sized misadventure”, so James passed on that one.

Sometimes, they just observed Officium Mundi, and learned about it.  The place wasn’t just a deathtrap.  Some dungeons were, James was willing to admit that.  But the Office seemed to have offloaded a lot of the hostility onto pseudo-natural processes.  The place did have an ecosystem, it was just hidden under layers of weirdness and hard to figure out.  But there were loose dangling lines of staples growing like moss in the shadows under desks that the staplers ate.  There was evidence of combat and even predation between the different creatures of these cubicle walls.  There were places where it became clear that the orbs weren’t just spawned from nothing; or at least not always.

James had known that the orbs could grow organically.  Back home, Rufus had even done it, somehow.  Made a vine that grew a withered little yellow orb that had died before it ‘ripened’ and didn’t even give a skill point.  But he’d done it.  Here, those vines grew below them, in the undercubes, seemingly accessible only through the walls of the great canyons they had to cross sometimes.  Great black tangles of rubber and copper, that, if you went deep enough, you could find orbs blooming on if they hadn’t been stripped already by something that lived here.

And the deeper in they went, the more alive the dungeon became.  The more bountiful, the more different ways the life was clearly part of an ecosystem.  Competing theories emerged about what the nature of it all ways, but James personally had started to feel that the first few miles out by the door were just the barren outskirts.  The sticks of the dungeon, where those who had given up or couldn’t survive in the healthier and more magical zones ended up.

And sometimes, sometimes, they found magic.

_____

A narrow gap through a thick collection of walls that never seemed to actually form cubicles had led them to an open floor plan office space.  Standing desks and a few whiteboards stood around haphazardly on a smooth, softly colored wood panel floor.  Unnatural natural light from a fake window set on a structural pillar made the place feel more comfortable and real, if you discounted the fact that you could see behind the pillar and knew the window was opened to nowhere at all.  Near the middle of the floor, an aquarium held what looked like perfectly normal fish, which was almost certainly a lie.

James had been certain they were going to get ambushed in the narrow gap.  He remembered going through one of those with Anesh roughly a billion years ago, and getting swarmed almost instantly.  But this one was empty, all the way up to the vines of dot matrix printer paper covering the end like an ancient ruin, which was a bit ominous.  But maybe they were just avoiding whatever had happened on the other side of the passage.

The mostly clear space was a couple hundred feet long and maybe fifty across, which made it feel way too large to be contained here, and yet also crowded in by the looming eight foot tall cubicle walls that surrounded the space in angular waves, looking almost tessellated as they closed in the glass desks and art deco lamps.

All thousand square feet were covered in the aftermath of a fight.

Loose papers still fluttered under the breeze of the air conditioning where they’d fallen to the floor.  Black ichor splattered various surfaces in sprays that often ended in pools of the stuff around dead staplers, computer mice, and something that looked like a particularly pointy drafting tool with dry erase markers for legs.  An offshoot of a strider, maybe, though still dead here among the other bodies.

The whole place looked like some kind of force had flung stuff out from the center, but very selectively.  One of the slanted desks had its glass surface shattered.  It had broken in a way that left a semicircle punched out of it like some kind of massive hole puncher had just taken it to town, and left the shards scattered underneath it.  At least one standing lamp was knocked over and smoldering, so James made a mental note that those light bulbs could be traps too and to make sure he didn’t get caught by them.  That thought got shared over skulljack tactical link almost instantly to his teammates.

It wasn’t clear who was fighting for what side, but there was one last thing that was of critical importance as James and Zhu knelt at the gap and let Anesh look over his head.

“That’s a green totem.”  Anesh said, pointing at the largest body.

James had only ever seen one green totem, in a cubicle tower here in this dungeon, before he’d yoinked a few dozen camracondas out of the place.  But this one certainly looked similar.  The green orb hovered over the ruin of a paper pusher, the creature’s cardstock skin pulled up and around the sphere in a spiral pattern like it was cradling it in place without daring to touch it.  The paper pusher’s blank face split in half, part of it laying on the floor in a pool of strider ichor, the other half hanging like it was magnetized to the space a few inches from the side of the orb.  The corpse formed a bizarre pattern in tandem with the green.

And it made James suspicious.  “So how did we find this place?”  He asked.

”What does it do?”  Arrush asked from farther back, unable to see the totem.

”Well, the last one made it so anyone hostile couldn’t find the place.”  James said.  “Not that we figured out what the parameters for hostile were.  Or how to duplicate it.”

”I’ve got a thought.”  Anesh said.  “What made the first one?”

”Uh… Morgan’s mom.”  James answered, still sweeping the room and tagging things in his skulljack.  “Oh.  Right.  Arrush, Bea, watch the lamps.  The explode.”

Bea made a noise that was almost an expression of emotion.  “Does anything in this environment not explode?”  She asked with her dead monotone.

”Us, if we’re careful.”

”Do you prepare these comments ahead of time?”  She asked James.  From anyone else, it might have sounded sarcastic or malicious, but from her it seemed like bland curiosity.

He smiled to himself as he tried to focus his eyes on a dead strider with thick metal pen legs.  “Nah, I’m just feeling spicy today.  Anyway, Anesh, your thought?”

”Ah, right right.  How did Morgan’s mom make a totem?”

”I’m not exactly clear on it, but I’m pretty sure it was out of blood.”  James said.  “Uh… her own blood.”

”…Do green totems only work if they’re made from dead people?”  Anesh spoke quietly, staring at the twisted ruin of the paper pusher.

It wasn’t a good idea to jump to conclusions, but the second data point did kind of indicate in that direction.  At the very least, where orange totems wanted more solid construction material and red totems tended to like things like wire and string, it might be safe to assume that green totems had a case of the bloodlusts.  Though James refrained from saying that out loud, and just nodded slowly in partial agreement with his boyfriend.

“So, who wants to guess what these lil’ guys were fighting over?”  JP asked as he watched through the skulljack link.  “Not the orb, right?”

James had a thought.  ”The weird thing about the totem,” he slowly stated as he tried to put to words what was bothering him, “is that the one in the camraconda nest wasn’t made from a camraconda.  It was made from a camraconda orb, but it was her own blood.  So if this one is made from a paper pusher orb, who made the totem?”

”It sure looks like the stuffed shirt is part of the construction.”  Anesh said, already looking at it with a mathematician's eyes, seeing vectors and patterns in the chaotic motions of the shredded paper form.

James shook his head.  “There’s strider ichor in there, and one of them next to it.  I think the stapler actually made it, and the corpse is incidental.”  He said.  “Or maybe I’m full of shit.”

”So is there a reason we’re still in the cramped dark hole, and not poking it?”  JP asked.

”We don’t know what it’s doing.” James said.  “So I’m gonna move carefully and you pull me back if I start to melt or something.”

”What do you think green totems even do?”  Anesh asked.

”Let’s find out.” James inched forward, bit by bit, staying crouched as he reached out over the threshold.  Nothing vaporized his fingers, and Zhu’s feathered hand curled up on his own didn’t react either, the infomorph still napping while manifested.  “Hm.”  He stood, and ventured a full step inside.

Something tugged against the back of his neck.  And James was suddenly more grateful than ever for the late Virgil’s work making the skulljack hardware that kept them from merging minds, because when his braid was ripped out, it just stung and didn’t leave him with disorienting memory loss.

Nothing else happened though.

”…Huh.”  Anesh said, looking at where the cords had dropped to the floor behind James, peeled out of the slot in his armor.  “I wonder.”  He tried to push the hardware forward with his boot, and found that it was like pushing against an immovable invisible wall.  “…Huh.”

”Bea, Anesh, JP, go back and get the others.”  James said.  “Arrush and I will work on widening this passage.  I get the feeling we’re going to want to camp here tonight so the engineers can get a good look at this thing while it’s active.”  He looked over to the far wall of the space, and nodded as he realized what the totem had been made for.

A whole chunk of the surrounding cubicle walls had been flattened outward, and the crushed remains of a tumblefeed lay in ruins amid the debris.  The totem, at least as far as he could tell, repelled cables.

”Sunny is going to hate this.”  Zhu muttered sleepily.

”Yeah, let’s not put this one in the Lair.”  James agreed.

_____

Mars’s Log.  Day three.

Probably.  It’s been two sleep cycles, so that feels like it should be day three.  But I keep feeling like we’re going to get out of here and learn that we’ve only been gone for a couple days and we could have slowed down.  Or that it’s been a hundred years and everyone we know is dead.  That one seems less likely, but at least the others will have finished the space elevator by then so I can piggyback off their hard work.

Chevoy got hurt today.  Pretty bad, too.  Her face was just broken, I’ve never seen anyone like that before.  It’s different than I expected.  Don’t know what I thought I’d feel, but I just froze up while they took her the others out for emergency attention.

Hope she’ll be okay.  I still need to tell. We’ve got projects to finish, and it takes a while to explain all the magic to the new people.

(Note to self : pitch idea for structured magic classes.  Pros, faster integration, forced examination of capabilities, wizard school.  Cons, wizard school, inevitable jokes about wizard school.)

We’ve stopped near a green orb construct.  Davis and I are next to the thing right now, and he thinks I’m taking notes.  I don’t even know what notes to make, so hopefully this helped get my brain juices flowing.

All we know about the things so far is that they seem to repel things.  This one repels cords. Physically.  The last one prevented observation, though, so what was it repelling?  Light?  That doesn’t make any sense, and I wish I could have seen it up close.

It can’t be just about repulsion.  It needs to be something else.

Pattern mapping and vector imaging is gonna be tricky, since there’s certain stuff we can’t get into the room.  But Therm says she has a fix for h that.  I assume it’s dumb, or magic, or both.

Maybe the constructs

Nile’s here now.  Being condescending.  If I just keep writing, maybe he’ll shut up.  He doesn’t condescend to Davis cause they’re both old, which is good, because I think Davis would hurt himself if he tried to put someone in a chokehold and he’d try if Nile talked down to him.

Maybe the constructs are drawing on what was hurting the people who made them.  This one flattened a tumblefeed, the last one kept the dungeon from seeing the camracondas.  Did the camracondas make that one?  (Ask Frequency)  Could be a connection.

At least thinking about this is a good distraction.  Still hope Chevoy is okay.

Possible connection between the blood (body?) used to make them, and the effect.  Human versus paper pusher.  No real way to test it if we suspect it requires a death, but-

Nile just said ‘blood sweat and tears’ and he might be onto something.  Keeka says we’re camping here today, so we’ll have some time to work on this.

Don’t really feel like sleeping.  Let’s see if I can draw this freehand properly.  At least the four different skills in art or drawing I got today will come in handy.

End log

(I should stop writing that bit)

_____

Long Delve Report - Officium Mundi - Day Three Acquisitions

Note : We’ve stopped doing exact counts for now.  Everyone is a bit too tired for that.

Material Wealth

Yellow Orbs (Size 1) : ~200

Yellow Orbs (Size 2) : ~50

Orange Orbs (Size 2) : ~20

Orange Orbs (Size 3) : ~10

Blue Orbs (Size 1) : ~50

Blue Orbs (Size 2) : ~10

Blue Orbs (Size 3) : 1 (Dave broke a chair)

Purple Orbs (Size 1) : ~80

Purple Orbs (Size 2) : ~20

Red Orbs (Size 1) : ~200

Green Orbs (Size 2) : ~30

Green Orbs (Size 3) : ~10

Blue Items (Misc, unidentified) ~70

Ritual Coffee : ~90 bags

Emerald Chips : ~150, +~60 lbs of processed silver

Expedition Followers

Striders : 14

Shellaxies : 2

iLipedes : 4

Wi-Figment : 1 (maybe)

Camracondas : 2 (prisoners)

Note : Cooperation from a portion of our strider friends let us teleport a good chunk of the acquired magic safely back to the entrance.

Expedition Voted Best Candy Name Of The Day : Inbetween